Ideate

What we’re reading

by Andrew on 06/11/06 at 10:40 am
2 comments

It seems like we’ve hit a purple patch of good books at the moment. They’re challenging the way we think about culture and business. Seeing as South Africa is usually a couple of years behind the rest of the world, this stuff is particularly pertinent to us right now.

Freakonomics – A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
This book deals with ‘the hidden side of everything’. It doesn’t have a lot to do with small business but is a pretty useful book to read nonetheless. It’s more about challenging the reader not to accept pre-conceived notions. Written by acclaimed economist Stephen Levitt (awarded ‘Best young Economist in America’), the book takes a journey into lateral thinking. Challenging, and often highly controversial, it touches on a variety of issues from crime (Levitt credits abortion as a major factor in the decrease if crime in the States) to the naming of children relating to their success in life.

The Long Tail – Why the Future Is Selling Less of More
If our cooking store YuppieChef was a physical retailer we would have a finite amount of shelf-space, and every product would need to “earn its keep” in order to justify its position on the shelf. We would be constantly trying to discriminate between the “hits” and everything else. But YuppieChef has infinite shelf-space, which means we can stock everything, and when an order is placed we collect it from one of our many suppliers. The “Long Tail” that Chris Anderson describes is the millions of products that normally don’t appear in retail stores, but when they are accessible to consumers they usually all sell. Every single song in iTunes’ huge database has been purchased at least once. It caused us to rethink our product strategy.

The World Is Flat – A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century
When you phone Jet Blue in America to make a travel booking you are routed through to a housewife working from home. Telecommunications and the internet has decentralized many industries, and has caused us to consider moving order processing for Flag Kit out of our office, and into homes. Thomas Friedman talks about how technology has change companies like Wal-Mart and McDonalds, and leaves you wondering how much of what we took for granted in business in the last century is going to apply in this century.

Andrew Smith is the pedantic systems guy behind Live Alchemy, a SA e-commerce company. Andrew writes for Ideate in an attempt to make the world a more efficient place. View more articles by Andrew.

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